Dr. Fauci and My Mom

by Molly Ladd-Taylor

Molly Ladd-Taylor, a professor of history at York University in Toronto, moved to Canada in the early 1990s. Her publications include Fixing the Poor: Eugenic Sterilization and Child Welfare in the Twentieth Century (2017) and a co-edited anthology, Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945 (2003).

In these scary times, many of us find comfort in watching Dr. Anthony Fauci on TV. I like seeing Dr. Fauci for another reason: he rekindles memories of my mom, who died in 1990.

Dr. Fauci was my mother’s doctor. For five years in the 1980s, she was a patient at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which he directs.

Like many people today, my mom had a strange and frightening disease. At first, we thought it might be pneumonia: she had a fever, cough, and fatigue. Then her eyes became red and swollen, her nose caved in, and she lost her hearing. She had bruises on her hands. Her lungs filled with fluid and she couldn’t breathe. For more than a year, my mother shuffled from specialist to specialist, receiving one diagnosis after another. At one point, an ambitious young medical resident leafed through The Merck Manual, the classic medical reference book, and informed my mom proudly: “Your symptoms might be Wegener’s Granulomatosis. If that’s what you have, you’re a goner.”

Happily, the resident’s medical knowledge was as out-of-date as his bedside manner. My mother did have Wegener’s, but Dr. Fauci and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health had developed an effective treatment. A disease that once killed 90% of patients within two years now had a 90% rate of remission. (Today, Wegener’s is called Granulomatosis with Polyangiitis, or GPA, because Wegener was a Nazi.)

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